In this episode we’re discussing an incredibly important question: How can leaders stay safe online?
Can I start by saying this is a really tricky topic to cover, but I made a call to try and do so in a more authentic, personal way rather than simply sharing stats and steps leaders can take. As a man, I’ve been shocked to learn just how many more women are targeted with abuse online. EVERYONE deserves the right to participate safely online, but it’s a sad reality far more women will likely be victims in this situation. So in this episode you’ll hear first hand experiences from women leaders, but I want to reinforce we ALL have a role to play keeping one another safe online.
The stories you’ll hear will likely be upsetting, but I do think they’re stories that need to be told. Particularly as this podcast is all about protecting and enhancing your digital reputation – sadly that includes some of the less pleasant stuff.
Today I’m joined by TWO guests who will help us explore the idea of staying safe online and what you – or your leaders if you’re a comms advisor listening in – what you can do to protect yourself and those around you. I’m extremely grateful they’re willing to speak and respect them greatly for their courage and honesty.
So it’s a huge thank you firstly to Amanda Yeates, CEO at SunCentral who is responsible for the development of Australia’s largest greenfield CBD development, the $3 billion, 53 hectare Maroochydore City Centre. Amanda was previously the Deputy Director General, at the Department of Transport and Main Roads in QLD where she oversaw the state’s $27 billion transport infrastructure program.
And we’re also joined by Anita L’Enfant, who is the program lead for Women In The Spotlight at the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, which provides training and resources that elevate and protect the voices of all women whose work or leadership requires an online presence. Anita has decades of experience in education and technology having worked closely with the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google, and knows better than most how ugly the online world can be.
A note of warning: will be talking about experiences of online abuse in this episode and in the show notes below, so there may be content in this episode that could be confronting or upsetting. Please feel free to take breaks, skip through sections or reach out for support as needed. If you are in Australia, you can report serious online abuse to eSafety.gov.au who can help get content taken down quickly and connect you with counselling and support services such as Beyond Blue, Lifeline and 1800RESPECT. As you will hear, online abuse can have real impacts, especially on our mental health and wellbeing, and it is important for us to recognise this and to not be afraid to reach out for the help we may need.
Here’s a snapshot from our discussion. I hope you find it as valuable and insightful as I did.
THE INSIGHTS + ADVICE.
Roger Christie: Amanda, it sounds like certainly in those early experiences [on LinkedIn], you had a really positive response. There was good interest in those personal stories, and that did have a flow on effect to, as you say, blending that personal and professional divide. Was that the case?
Amanda Yeates: The very first post that I did had quite a significant number of interactions with it. They were all very, very positive and that made me think, ‘Well, you know, maybe I will do this a little bit more regularly.’ So I started to look at some of the things that I had been talking about and some of the stories that I’d been telling internally, and I started to put some of those out.
That very first post was very much about my family interactions, my interactions with my two children. I actually had a photo up there of myself, my husband, and my two girls. And I have to admit, it started to get a bit nasty even on that very first post. A few people were sort of suggesting that I was trying to compensate for being an absent mother.
But they were reasonably low level. And even in explaining this to you, I find it really interesting that I’m almost discounting the experience, right from the very start of actually getting that feedback that really was very negative, very unnecessary and very unproductive.
I’d sort of discounted it away going, ‘Oh, okay, well people have the right to their opinion.’ And, I sort of looked at some of these comments and then a few other people would jump in on the negative comments and be in my corner. So I didn’t delete them. I didn’t block those people. I just left them there. They did escalate a little bit, but it was actually subsequent posts that started to get much more nasty.
Roger Christie: So – and obviously what you are comfortable sharing – when you say ‘started to get more nasty’, what changed? What sort of things started to happen?
Amanda Yeates: The things that I post about, mostly the stories that I tell are about my experiences as a professional and a leader in a sector that’s quite male dominated. And I try to tell really positive stories because my experiences largely have been extremely positive.
I have found the workplace to be very supportive. I have found my colleagues to be very supportive and I’ve had a really interesting and diverse career. And so what I have tried to do in telling those stories is think, ‘Early in my career what would it have been like if I’d had people who I could have looked to and I had felt more connection with?’
And two things happened. One was I started to get some sort of low level commenting on my parenting. I also started to get some private messages that ranged from sort of quite leery, quite creepy. It was these people who were reaching out in a sexual way. And then I would also get direct messages, which were just really offensive. Telling me that I had no right to be doing what I was doing.
People were telling me I wasn’t a good leader, I shouldn’t be in the position that I was in. That I only had the position that I’ve got because I’m a woman and that sort of thing. It’s interesting that the low level stuff people felt more comfortable putting actually on the post. It was the nasty stuff that became the direct and private messages.
Roger Christie: Isn’t that interesting? Because I think that talks to a couple of realities. If I speak from my own experience, if those sorts of things are going on behind the scenes and are coming through privately, you don’t see them unless you’re receiving them, you don’t see them unless you’re talking about them – others don’t know they exist.
And I think one of the greatest challenges in this idea of staying safe online is that a large percentage of the population online is simply unaware of what’s going on and how damaging that can be. And I speak again as a male looking at the numbers, and I know how much this impacts particularly women leaders like yourself, Amanda. So I know that there is an unfair volume of online criticism and abuse targeting women leaders. And because this is happening privately, men simply aren’t aware. It’s a bit like the iceberg under the surface. I don’t think people are aware of the magnitude of this issue.
If I can ask again, you started to see this change in tone and you started to see these different messages coming through, and things that you say were obviously inappropriate. How did you react? What did you do as a result?
Amanda Yeates: Well, interestingly, I think initially I tried to just ignore it. And so I thought, ‘Oh, look, you know what your parents always told you. If you ignore bullies, they go away.’ And so I just left it but then it would escalate and escalate and escalate. And the interesting thing is a few months ago I did put a post up [on LinkedIn] and I called it out. I didn’t call out specific individuals, but I called out the behaviour.
Part of the reason was because so many people had said to me, ‘Oh, we haven’t seen you posting lately. We really enjoy your interactions. It gives us some different perspective. It helps us to understand as a major government client where you’re thinking is at internally.’
So they were actually talking about the fact that it wasn’t just the storytelling that was useful, it was actually the fact that the storytelling was drawing them into the technical content that brought them closer to us as a client at the time.
And so I thought, ‘Well, hang on a minute. I’ve actually consciously or subconsciously really pulled back from social media and I have done that because it’s not making me feel comfortable.’ So I put the post up and the interesting thing was that there were a number of people who commented on the post really supportively.
Lots of people said that they were completely unaware that this was going on. Lots of my colleagues and people that I knew through a work context were absolutely horrified that I was experiencing this and they expressed that with real empathy, which was lovely. I felt really supported. The interesting thing for me though, was the number of other women who sent me a direct message to say they were so glad that I had put that post up because they too were experiencing similar things.
I think the interesting thing though is separately, in a previous conversation that I’d had with Anita L’Enfant at the eSafety Commissioner we talked about the things you should do when you’re experiencing this behaviour. Everything Anita told me was common sense – they were the steps that I probably would’ve told somebody else to do when I was in that situation myself. But I didn’t do any of those common sense things about keeping records etc. There was none of that that I did.
I think I really struggled myself to know how to deal with it. I did fall into that very typical trap of going, ‘Oh, this must be my fault. I must have done something to warrant people thinking that this is the sort of interaction that I am seeking out on social media.’ I genuinely was looking inwards and saying, It must have, it must be me.
Roger Christie: I think that’s really upsetting and disappointing in the sense that, you know it is no fault of your own. As you describe your journey, what you were doing was using a medium, which is touted as being equal and accessible for anyone, to share positive messages about leadership, about the things that you cared about, about the things that were important in your life. And even as you talk back to that original post, reflections on your own parenting style and things where you would’ve done things differently, there was an honesty and a vulnerability to this.
And the response you get from some people is so disappointing, people who have no other agenda except to bring you and, and others down, for whatever reason. As you said, it makes you question whether you should keep doing this and whether you should keep posting? And for me that’s one of the most upsetting things is that voices are quieted without any grounds for doing so and without any fairness in that.
So if, if I can perhaps just ask one final question around that experience – what you were saying just now about you being quieter on social media, people noticed that you could have turned off social media altogether at that point, and you didn’t. Why is that? Why did you keep going?
Amanda Yeates: I think I had such an overwhelming positivity to the interactions that I had had. This was such a small minority, and I think stepping back from it for a period of time was really important. I don’t think I could have continued to interact on LinkedIn in the way that I had been and been able to get my head right. So I had to step back a bit and when I did, I sort of started to think, ‘Well, hang on a minute. Why should it be me that has to step away from this?’
Why is it that, because of other people’s behaviour that I have to modify my behaviour, which I think has been professional and respectful and my intentions have been around lifting other people up. So why should I have to do that? And that one post that I posted where I called, in a general way, the behaviour out was actually really empowering for me, and it was empowering for me because I had so much support around that.
And I think what’s important to me working in a sector within the construction sector – I’m a civil engineer and female participation in civil engineering still sits around 9-13% and, more broadly female participation in the construction sector is around 5%. So, I think the sort of behaviour that I was seeing online is exactly the sort of behaviour that drives people away from the sector that I work in.
And so I thought, I cannot allow this small minority of people to drive me away from something that not only do I enjoy – interacting on social media has broadened my professional networks – but has actually made me a better leader. It’s made me have the courage to make some leadership and professional decisions that I possibly wouldn’t have made. It’s just such a good medium for me and I didn’t want to be driven off it because of a minority of people who felt that they had the right to interact in a way that was really quite appalling.
Roger Christie: I really respect the courage and the decision to call out this behaviour. Anita, what are some of the basic steps people can and should take to keep themselves safe online?
Anita L’Enfant: My advice is trust your gut. When you get that feeling that actually, this doesn’t look right, the first thing we should all do is collect the evidence.
Firstly, know how to take a screenshot on your device. Often we find that online abuse happens over time. And I think this is particularly true as women – we tend to just put up with it and put up with it and put up with it. And then maybe a month or two down the track, we think, ‘Gosh, this has gone on for far too long. I want to report it.’ But then you may not have the evidence of what’s happened before. So our [eSafety Commissioner’s] advice is to collect the evidence. You can always delete it later on if you’ve decided, ‘No, I’m not going to do anything about this’.
The next thing I think is really important is we should all be familiar with how to report. The eSafety Commissioner is the world’s first online regulator and we are really excited to be able to provide the opportunity for Australians to report to eSafety. eSafety is responsible for, and in most cases we can, taking down the offensive material. We work really closely with online platforms but importantly, for children’s cyber bullying and adult cyber abuse, you need to report to the platform first. Know to look on your posts to report for the three dots or the three lines.
76% of women in the WITS (Women in the spotlight) research told us that they wouldn’t even bother reporting to platforms because they don’t do anything about it. So we’re on a mission to help platforms to explain more about why we should.
All platforms tell us that that’s how they learn more about what’s going on and about the type of material that’s out there. So it is important to report to platforms. If they don’t take the material down, then you can report to eSafety. And it’s really simple. You go online, you go to the eSafety website, you look for the little red box that says ‘REPORT ABUSE’, and then you’re asked to fill in a form.
And in the form it asks you some questions so that our investigators can understand what is this abuse, what is it like, and what can we do about it? And then they’ll contact you. The great thing about reporting to eSafety, and again, this is true on most platforms, is that third party reporting or having someone else report for you, is something that you are able to do.
Roger Christie: And I must say, on behalf of the community, thank you for pioneering that. We know that the eSafety Commissioner is doing many world firsts. And when we appreciate that in terms of trying to keep our online spaces safe and trying to keep platforms and individuals accountable, I think that’s really important.
Again, we appreciate the content in this episode could be confronting or upsetting. Please do reach out for support as needed. If you are in Australia, you can report serious online abuse to eSafety.gov.au who can help get content taken down quickly and connect you with counselling and support services such as Beyond Blue, Lifeline and 1800RESPECT. Online abuse can have real impacts, especially on our mental health and wellbeing, and it is important for us to recognise this and to not be afraid to reach out for the help we may need.
Please drop Roger Christie a note with any thoughts from this conversation – we’d love to hear from you – and be sure to subscribe to the Your Digital Reputation newsletter packed full of advice, trends and the best leadership examples just for you.
